NEW YORK (AP) – A controversial play about a young American student who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while trying to stop the destruction of a Palestinian home in the Gaza Strip will open in New York in October, several months after another theater pulled the show from its schedule, drawing charges of censorship.

Producers Pam Pariseau and Dena Hammerstein said in a statement Thursday that they will present the U.S. premiere of London’s Royal Court Theatre production of the one-woman show “My Name Is Rachel Corrie” at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Previews are scheduled to start on Oct. 5, with the opening of the 48-performance run scheduled for Oct. 15.

“We both saw the play and both responded to it very strongly,” Hammerstein told The New York Times for an article published Thursday. “We identified with the material in terms of being mothers and were struck by the production and the theatricality.”

Director Alan Rickman, the British actor, and Katherine Viner, features editor of The Guardian newspaper in London, put the one-woman play together from the diaries, letters and e-mails of Corrie, a 23-year-old human rights activist, who died when struck by an Israeli bulldozer in the southern Gaza town of Rafah in March 2003.

It opened at the Royal Court Theatre in London in April 2005 to generally positive reviews.

The play returned for a limited run at London’s Playhouse Theatre in the West End this spring after the New York Theatre Workshop, one of the city’s leading off-Broadway spaces, indefinitely suspended a production scheduled to open in March.

At the time, Rickman said the Theatre Workshop had canceled the run, and accused it of “censorship born out of fear.” But in a March 14 statement posted on the company’s Web site, Theatre Workshop artistic director James C. Nicola said the company had sought only more time to “find ways to let Rachel’s words rise above the polemics.”

“We regret that requesting more time to achieve that goal was interpreted as failing to fulfill a commitment and, worse, as censorship,” he said.

Corrie traveled to the Middle East with the International Solidarity Movement, an activist group that tries to stop Israeli military operations in the Palestinian territories. An Israeli investigation ruled the death accidental.

Since her death, Corrie has become a divisive figure in the United States, with supporters hailing her bravery and commitment and opponents condemning her as foolish and naive.

“We were never going to paint Rachel as a golden saint or sentimentalize her,” Rickman said in the Thursday statement issued by the producers for James Hammerstein Productions. “But we also needed to face the fact that she’d been demonized.

“We wanted to present a balanced portrait. The activist part of her life is absolutely matched by the imaginative part of her life. I’ve no doubt at all that had she lived there would have been novels and plays pouring out of her.”

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